About

My name is Brianna Marshall and I am the Scientific Data Curation Assistant in the Scholarly Communication Department. While my responsibilities primarily pertain to helping researchers manage their data, I also work with IUScholarWorks (IUSW) quite frequently. Making your work available in IUSW ensures that it is preserved and made available to researchers around the world. Unfortunately, individuals submitting work to IUSW and other institutional repositories may find themselves targeted by predatory open access publishers.

What is a predatory publisher?

Often, predatory publishers do not offer traditional editorial services, such as peer review (although they may claim that they do). Many of these journals will accept an article then let the author know that they owe an exorbitant publication fee.

These predatory publishers can seem legitimate – they may have fully functional websites and authors rights statements that are similar to those of well-respected publishers, but this is no guarantee of their quality. The rise of online publishing has made it easier for these groups to masquerade as legitimate publishers.

How can I identify a predatory publisher?

Predatory publishers don’t serve any risk to researchers if you can identify and discount them as an option for disseminating your work.

Predatory publishers are seeking to make a large profit, so they are known to aggressively seek out new authors or editors. Receiving a form email that requests your submission to a particular publisher should be your first clue. Some publishers are bold enough to find authors who have submitted to institutional repositories: a librarian within our department experienced this firsthand after submitting her work into IUSW.

Don’t be fooled by these publishers. If you have any suspicions about the publisher, we recommend that you consult Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado-Denver, publishes a list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” on his website. If after consulting his list you still have questions or concerns, consult your local librarian.

How can I avoid unwanted reuse of my work?

Clearly licensing your work with a non-commercial Creative Commons license is a possible way to thwart unwanted reuse of your work, but it’s not fool-proof. The rise of predatory publishers means that scholars need to be more vigilant than ever about researching where they choose to publish and what rights they have over that work.

Hi, I am Pallavi Murthy and I will be working for IUScholarWorks under Scholarly Communications as a Graduate Assistant through fall 2013 and spring 2014. This is my first blog and I am very excited to start off my job with multiple duties at hand! Well, let me put it this way- I am very happy to work on something I really love- Data and Analytics!

To say that data analysis is important to business will be an understatement. In fact, no business can survive without analyzing available data. Data analysis is the lifeline of any business. Whether one wants to arrive at some marketing decisions or fine-tune new product launch strategy, data analysis is the key to all the problems. What is the importance of data analysis – instead, one should say what is not important about data analysis. Merely analyzing data isn’t sufficient from the point of view of making a decision. How does one interpret from the analyzed data is more important. Thus, data analysis is not a decision making system, but decision supporting system. Data analysis can offer the following benefits:

Structuring the findings from survey research or other means of data collection

Break a macro picture into a micro one

Acquiring meaningful insights from the dataset

Basing critical decisions from the findings

Ruling out human bias through proper statistical treatment. [1]

Libraries can use data analysis for many of the same functions that businesses do. My first project for IUScholarWorks was to perform such an analysis on their website.

Said and done, I am using Google Analytics to analyze the Libraries Website, specifically website traffic related to Data Management. I am also analyzing web traffic for Journals under IU Libraries, including JoSoTL and JoTLT, which the IUScholarWorks team has put a great deal of time and effort into maintaining.

Next, Stacy asked me to run the analytics for Publication and Data Services webpage, so she could understand if people were using that webpage to find their way to IUScholarWorks. The report shows that IUScholarWorks Repository, Journal Publishing and Data Management Services is one of the most popular link on that page.

It is interesting and delighting to know how IUScholarWorks is trying very hard to make scholarly research and journals open access. I feel as important the efforts for making open access is, so important it is to know the whereabouts of the efforts actually reaching to its users. I would like to analyze more and more reports and bring in some valuable data wonder (as I call it!) in my next upcoming blogs.

To know more about IUScholarWorks, Depositing your scholarly research, Publishing an online journal and Archive and increasing availability of your research data visit http://scholarworks.iu.edu/.

My name is Shayna Pekala and I am thrilled to have joined the Scholarly Communication Department this fall as the IUScholarWorks Assistant. I would like to use this post to highlight one of the IUScholarWorks services I have worked with extensively over the last month: open access publishing of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

What is this service and why is it important?

The IUScholarWorks ETD service allows you to make the full text of your ETD available online for free. The main benefits of using this service can be summed up in two words: preservation and accessibility. If you publish your ETD with IUScholarWorks, we will preserve your work in perpetuity, even as technology changes. In addition, by making your ETD open access in our repository, your work will be exposed to major search engines, rendering it more discoverable. (Fun fact: there have been several studies conducted like this one that show open access articles are cited more frequently than non-open access articles.)

How does the service work?

All graduate students must submit their ETDs through ProQuest via the Graduate School website. These submissions are automatically ingested into a dark archive (one that can’t be accessed by any users) within the IUScholarWorks repository. IU requires that permission from the copyright holder be obtained before these ETDs can be made openly accessible. So, graduate students must give us permission to release their ETD by filling out this form. Once permission has been received, an IUScholarWorks staff member goes into the system, releases the ETD, and poof! the ETD becomes open access.

If I make my ETD open access, will I still be able to publish it later on as a monograph or in a journal?

There is a widely held assumption that the majority of publishers consider openly accessible ETDs to be prior publications, thus precluding them from future publication. However, a study published in July 2013, “Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?”, found evidence to challenge this belief. The study reports that only 2.9% of journal publishers and 7.3% of university presses will not consider manuscripts derived from openly accessible ETDs under any circumstances. While the study concludes that submissions derived from ETDs are not considered prior publications by publishers, it is still advisable to check specific publisher policies if this is something you are considering.

Yiotis, K. (2008). Electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) repositories: What are they? Where do they come from? How do they work? OCLC Systems & Services, 24(2), 101-115. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10650750810875458

Interested in using data visualization to enhance your research but don’t know where to begin? Learn how to use basic data visualization techniques and tools including Voyant, OpenRefine, Gephi, and Sci2 at our workshop, where we’ll give users the chance to test their skills using data from a variety of open data sources. Experts will also cover the best ways to manage your data throughout its lifecycle. No data visualization experience needed, but attendees should have a working knowledge of Microsoft Excel.